Brett Lock on Creativity

Brett Lock, 49, is a London-based South African creative. He is primarily known as a songwriter and musician. However, he works in several mediums has done a lot of writing and design to boot. This is his interview about the nature his creative habits and process and the thing itself.

He is a fantastic example of the principle of being creative because THAT’S WHO YOU ARE, rather than being driven by fame of money (as his interview evidences). Previously, he has worked variously as a graphic designer, magazine columnist, academic, painter & decorator and dot.com entrepreneur to keep the wolves from the door. All this while pursuing a cavalier and quixotic career in music, which he’s to hide from the public managed with great success.

His current band is called The Sighs of Monsters which produces quirky and darkly sophisticated songs about love and life, and the loss of both. He is married to Christopher Houston, his collaborator, facilitator and enabler.

Of his work, Brett remarks, “My creative endeavours encompass writing and design, but I’m something of a Renaissance man in that I dabble in a lot of things. In that sense, I have a “multimedia” skill-set (encompassing photography, news writing, audio-visual creation and editing, music production, print and digital publication design, etc, etc…) but my main creative focus is song-writing and playing music.”

“My main commercial focus is graphic design – throughout my music ‘career’, graphic design (production and teaching) has paid my bills though I’m not particularly excited about it these days as I once was. Since my student days in the late 80s, I have more or less continuously made music with my succession of bands in which I was generally one of the principle songwriters. None of these has ever been commercially successful.”

“My current band is The Sighs of Monsters. We are currently working on our third album. From time to time, I also flirt with poetry, and journalism. And, of course I produce a weekly podcast about South African music with my old friend Leon.”